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Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Call for Proposals

The Intimate State: Gender, Sexuality, and Governance in Modern U.S. History
Call for Proposals: Due April 10, 2017
Editors: Margot Canaday, Nancy Cott, & Robert Self
We are soliciting original history essays—archive-based research on specific topics,
as well as conceptual essays addressing more abstract questions— regarding
gender, sexuality and the state for a new edited volume. We seek to bring twenty-
five years of scholarship on gender, sexuality, and the family to bear on the history
of modern state authority in the United States (1865 to the present). While the
volume will reach back to the Reconstruction era and value this history as such, we
also hope to point toward a usable past in an uncertain present.
The historical study of state power (its accumulation at various scales, its structures,
and its modes of operation) is a longstanding field while that of gender, sex, and
sexuality is relatively young though very vibrant. For the most part, these two fields
have produced their profoundest insights and advancements without substantial
dialogue with one another. Yet contemporary developments and recent scholarship
have made it plain that government action at the local, state and federal levels is
entwined with incentives, obligations and punishments related to gender and
sexuality, and that decisions imagined as personal and intimate choices are almost
always already structured by state rules.
These collected essays will aim to demonstrate that the involvements of government
authority in intimate life warrant greater historical analysis and theorization than
they have generated to date. We envision a volume that encourages scholars whose
primary intellectual commitment is to the history of gender and sexuality to
leverage that scholarship in the service of new understandings of modern state
power (whether at local, state, regional, national, or transnational scales) and that
scholars of state authority will also be persuaded to attend more to the insights of
gender and sexuality studies in their scholarship. How might the history of
American state development—its periodization, its overall theorization—look
different at every governmental level from the local to the federal when questions of
gender and sexuality move to the center of the analytical frame? The volume invites
intersectional approaches to that question, foregrounding the relationship of
gender, sexuality, and state power to race, class, and other categories of analysis and
experience, and also welcomes contributions that are transnational or comparative
in their approach.
Possible topics might include gender/sexuality and:
--borders of the nation/immigration
--racism, racial violence
--political economy
--penal power and incarceration

--electoral/party politics
--citizenship
--militarization and war
--empire
--indigeneity
--national security
as well as state power/regulation and:
--forms of marriage, nonmarriage, marital dissolution
--commercialized sex/sex work
--sexual violence
--sexual science, eugenics
--pornography
--obscenity
--reproduction, contraception, abortion
--heterosexuality
--LGBT rights
--HIV/AIDS
--transgender lives and experiences
Please send an abstract of no more than 750 words, including references to major
sources for the research if archive-based, to Margot Canaday
(mcanaday@princeton.edu), Nancy Cott (ncott@fas.harvard.edu), and Robert Self
(robert_self@brown.edu) by April 10, 2017, along with a one-page CV. Authors will
be notified by June 1, 2017, of their selection to participate in a conference to be
held at Brown University in January of 2018. Essays (of no more than 10,000 words)
to be circulated for the conference will be due December 15, 2017.